I’m in Europe and hardly ever receive unsolicited SMS or phone calls. Somehow, at least to me, this seems like a US problem. Why is that? What does EU do that it is not a problem here? Or does it just mean that we have a ‘business opportunity’ here?
AIUI, this is because in the US they don't set aside different prefixes/area codes for mobile/cell numbers, so when they were first introduced and mobile calls cost more, it was unfair to bill callers extra because they had no way of knowing they would be calling a mobile number. Therefore, they put the extra cost onto the receiver of mobile calls. With this billing expectation in place, they put the cost of SMSs onto the receiver also.
It does mean that in the US, businesses sending SMSs to individuals are supposed to go through a "double opt-in" process and have really easy opt-out procedures, on pain of the FCC having some kind of punitive actions available. But I guess they must not be working, or something.
Or my info may be out of date?
The US environment led to prices trending to under a penny to send an sms or make a one minute phone call. IIRC, FCC rules say telephone carriers can no longer charge other telephone carriers for calls at all, the wholesale price is zero (+ connection costs).
On the other hand, in Europe, sending an SMS or calling a mobile phone for a minute is closer to 10-20 cents. That's a lot costlier, and then you've got a lot more languages to support, and different payment preferences per country. Easier to just target English and the US.
The interconnection rates used to be an important source of income for mobile operators (some of them would even pay their prepaid users, not paying any monthly fee, a bonus per incoming minute of calls!), but these days, mobile and landline interconnect rates have almost converged, as far as I can tell.
E-Plus also hasn't existed as an independent entity for quite some years now; they were acquired by Telefonica/O2 in 2014.
Seems like Twilio is charging quite the margin there, based on vastly outdated pricing...
I'm paying €8 for 10000 minutes, 10000 texts and 100Gb of traffic per month.
I don't understand what do you mean by that. If the sender and recipient are both in US how does this make sense?
If you call outside your local area, that's a bigger charge, at least historically.
But, cell phones are more expensive to run than landlines (historically, anyway), so the question becomes who pays that extra expense when someone calls a cell phone. You can do caller pays, and then typically have mobile numbers in a separate part of the numbering plan and cell phones receive free incoming calls; or you can do recipient pays and mobile numbers are usually mixed into the numbering plans and cell phones have to pay for incoming calls.
As time goes by, costs go down, but caller pays carriers have an income stream from incoming calls that's harder to drive down with competition. Few people are going to switch carriers so it's less expensive for others to call them. Especially if retail plans tend to bundle things.
But for recipient pays carriers, there is competition among carriers to make it less expensive for their customers to receive calls, and now most US carriers offer unlimited talk and text on retail plans on most plans, even low cost plans.
But that's not something particularly unique to the US?
High cost is an effective anti-spam technique, but it also raises costs for legitimate business uses.
That said, unlike in Europe, there are also effectively no truly free (i.e. no monthly fee) prepaid plans in the US.
So in a way, you could also say that users are still sharing the cost of inbound texts, although at an implied flat rate (blended into the monthly minimum that exists even for pay-as-you-go plans), rather than per message.
Technically, the FCC cares about as much about unsolicited robocalls as they do for unsolicited SMS messages for the TCPA. And the penalties can add up quickly; $500-$1,500 USD -per violation-, not per person you violated the TCPA (IOW, if your automated system sends 10 texts to 10 people that it shouldn't have, it's potentially $50,000-$150,000 and not $5,000-15,000).
The upshot for -consumers-, is that there are lots of hungry TCPA lawyers that will happily take your case. Some people even try to file claims themselves, even if it may not be fully legitimate[0].
The issue with robocalls, versus SMS messages: I've found that even if you follow the TCPA 'Script', you'll at best wind up in a weird state in the robocaller's system where they will still call you, but the system immediately disconnects. On top of that, the numbers are often spoofed anyway[1] so it's difficult to get the right number. AFAIK SMS messages, it's harder to spoof the number.[2]
[0] - 'Illegitimate claim' can range from "Somebody didn't pay attention to a box they checked on an online form" to "Welp this guy's going to jail for stalking... I guess stupid criminals do exist."
[1] - IDK if SHAKEN/STIR will help much, but here's hoping
[2] - OTOH There is a real problem with numbers getting 'poached', even if they are already registered with a VOIP carrier that follows all the proper processes around porting. One bad actor makes it easy to mess up the system.
That explains all the weird messages apps show about verification SMS "incurring charges"! Back in high school I avoided so many apps for no clear reason because I was afraid I needed to pay a fee every time I used these apps and only found out years later that none of that stuff would've cost me anything.
A service where you have no real say in the charges you need to pay when someone else contacts you through it sounds so crazy to me! I'm pretty sure most people in most countries don't get charged per SMS anymore, though.
Every single time the subject of robocalls or spam texts is brought up on HN, someone claiming to be from Europe shows up to ask why it's a U.S.-only problem.
Then people from Germany and France and Greece and the U.K., and elsewhere in Europe show up and say how they have to deal with it, too, and it's not just an American thing.
In my RSS feed are several European news sources, and they all talk about robocalls occasionally.
Who are these apparently very few people in Europe who allegedly have never dealt with telephonic spam, and why do they always feel the need to talk about their personal situation when it has no bearing on the discussion at hand?
You state that you "hardly ever receive unsolicited SMS or phone calls."
I'm in America, and I too get unsolicited messages "hardly ever": about one unsolicited SMS per month, and spam phone calls about six times a year on my work phone, and maybe once each year on my personal phone. Don't delude yourself into believing that every phone in the nation is flooded with spam all the time.
I have two phones, and usually just put the one for the country Im not currently in on a charger and hide it away in a drawer, and take it out only when Im packing to go to the other continent again.
The Canadian phone usually gets 50-100 spam messages and missed calls during the 2-3 months Im not using it.
The Czech phone has never had a spam message or missed call on it ever.
I dont see why strories like this would have no bearing on this discussion. Its relevant, anecdotal evidence.
But carriers recycle numbers, often pretty quickly after someone ends their service. The number on the Canadian phone of yours may have previously belonged to someone who plastered the number all over the internet, and used it to sign up for a bunch of things run by people who had no qualms over selling their customer data to spammers.
So no, these stories are not particularly relevant or useful, because they can never take into account the full history.
One of the reasons I can imagine is that the Bundesnetzagentur is actually pretty quick about disconnecting abusers.
And you just took the info I provided, and added another piece of the puzzle. The observation that more spam exists in US/Canada still applies, is supported by my anecdote, and explained by your analysis. To me, very much proving this info is indeed relevant to the debate.
Unless we want to go super meta about relevance and usefulness.
I learned new things, thank you.
Here in Germany at the very least this isn't the case as robo calling as well as unsolicited cold calling to private households can be fined with high fines of 10k+ Euros per call. I've maybe had two calls like this in the last 20 years.
This mirrors the experience of everyone I know. When an active robo-scam-call campaign was happening to people it made national news.
That's a very large difference with the typical US experience...
It‘s definitely no so bad that people don‘t pick up for unknown numbers/callers anymore, which seems to not be uncommon in the US.
published their contact information in a public database (like company registry),
given their contact information to a company and unwittingly checked the "agree to use for marketing purposes/share with third parties" consent
are included in a high profile data breach of some kind
are the unlucky, statistically unlikely victim of spam from a new source that is yet to receive punitive action
How is this avoidable specifically in Europe you say? Breaches affect us here just as much as anywhere else, specially since most breaches are user/client lists from large corporations most people can't afford to stop dealing with.
> are the unlucky, statistically unlikely victim of spam from a new source that is yet to receive punitive action
Unlikely? Given the rate at which scam and spam calls have increased in my country as data breaches built up, and this has been going for long already, I doubt they're getting much punitive action here.
Don't use your main phone/mail for registration, so you can avoid spam on it.
> Unlikely? Given the rate at which scam and spam calls have increased in my country as data breaches built up, and this has been going for long already, I doubt they're getting much punitive action here.
I'm not talking about data breaches, that's covered in previous point. I'm talking about punitive action towards spammers that dial random numbers, etc. as they're easily identifiable by the operator
Used to get a lot of phone spam before the telephone preference service (TPS) came in, but not since. Quite a bit of spam in relative terms when running a business landline in a retail shop; tech support scams, service switch scams, invoice scams, but only about once a month.
I have never had a spam SMS or call in Norway, while on Malta it's a regular occurrence, thought not as bad as described by US folks.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/04/spam-calls-why-ajit-pai...